<![CDATA[Forgotten Poets: Poems & Prints]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/s/forgotten-poemshttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!301L!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F809fe9a2-275e-4d7b-9679-83eacdf43fc7_1280x1280.pngForgotten Poets: Poems & Printshttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/s/forgotten-poemsSubstackTue, 21 Apr 2026 18:51:25 GMT<![CDATA["Wych Elm" (a.k.a. Marie R. Randle) - 4 Short Poems (1893)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/wych-elm-aka-marie-r-randle-4-shorthttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/wych-elm-aka-marie-r-randle-4-shortThu, 16 Apr 2026 20:11:38 GMT
   
              —: An Evening Sky :—

       The evening sky is one of hush’d repose;
       The solemn clouds that in the foreground loom
       Seem to hang spell-bound in the silent air;
       Far in the west the blue of heav’n is tinged
       With tend’rest rose,—while shafts of amber show
       Where yet the sun doth live behind the hill.
       So soft and peaceful be my ev’ning sky
       (Life’s storm-clouds hanging dimly in the past,
       But shadowy mem’ries; be my sunset calm,
       Thrill’d with a light that beameth from beyond,
       And full of holy sweet expectancy!
   
    
              —: To The River I :—

       I’ve known thee, fair river, in calm and in flood,
       And dearly I’ve lov’d thee, whatever thy mood;—
       Thy wild-surging torrent when swollen with snows,
       And threat’ning thy voice as an oncoming foe’s,
       Thy smooth silver reaches the moonlight beneath,
       Thy musical shallows in eddying wreath;
       Thy deep sullen pools where the sleeping trout lie,
       Thy broad sunny mill-pond reflecting the sky;
       Thy rushy retreats where the water-fowl hide,
       The soft fringe of willows thy waters beside,
       Thy white, foamy falls—all are dear unto me,
       Yet farewell, bright river, and hail to the sea!
    
   
              —: On A Distant View of the Southern Alps :—

       Those fairy heights in the blue distance rise
       With spiritual beauty, delicate
       And pure as angels’ faces in a dream!—
       Their snowy outlines, softly, faintly keen,
       Are pencill’d on the rosy sky beyond
       By Artist's hand Divine; no mortal skill
       Could vie with such enchanting workmanship,
       Or picture half the magic of the scene!—
       Adown, around, the varying landscape heaves
       In many a bush-clad knoll and rolling hill,
       Far to the limit of the whisp’ring sea!
       But all the charms of soft’ning hill and dale
       (Whose shaded green dies in a golden haze),
       And all the beauty of the changing wave
       (Dancing and laughing to the sunny sky),
       All fade and are forgot, when fall our eyes
       On the weird glory of that phantom range,
       That rises ghostly-beautiful afar,
       Like some faint vision of another world!
   
    
              —: The Lost Poem :—

       Munching bread and butter 
       I compos’d a poem, 
       A la Percy Shelley 
       (Reader, do you know him?)—
       ’Twas a pretty ditty, 
       Full of dainty fancy, 
       Such as would delight a 
       Gentle Jane or Nancy; 
       Of ambrosial flavour, 
       Redolent of nectar 
       (Though its scanning, maybe, 
       Might have been correcter)— 

       And my word I give you, 
       Without stint or stutter, 
       I compos’d it, munching 
       Slabs of bread and butter! 
       It was light and tender 
       (Not the food, the poem)—
       Could I find those lines, I’d 
       Gladly to you show' em; 
       But I think I scrawled' em 
       On the kitchen table, 
       And to find their traces 
       Now am quite unable. 
       (Fact is, I was hungry, 
       And those lines to utter 
       Fail’d—because my mouth was 
       Full of bread and butter!) 

       Washing up the dishes, 
       I washed out my ditty; 
       So the world has lost it—
       Isn't it a pity?

Wych Elm, a.k.a. Marie Randle Dawkins (1856-1912?), was born in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, in Wales. Second child of John and Sarah Dawkins, who owned a large drapery store, Dawkins began playing piano and writing poetry from a young age. In 1877 Dawkins married Howard Randle—principal of Buxton College in Essex, stage singer, and her first-cousin-once-removed—and sometime around 1883 they emigrated to Aotearoa/New Zealand where Randle worked as a teacher.

It was in Aotearoa that Dawkins “began publishing her poems, becoming a regular contributor to the newspaper, the Otago Witness, under the pen name ‘Wych Elm’. These largely reflect her daily life—the children, the beach, and above all the bush and the song of the birds, often evoking a contrast with those she had known in Britain.” (NZHistory) Despite being written in “formal” rhymed verse, Dawkin’s poetry belongs to the “new poetry” traditions of the late-1800s—the first editions of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, for instance, had been published just 3 years earlier in 1890—particularly given its (for the time) “radical” content (i.e. “women’s work,” domestic life, etc.) in combination with a colloquial style and compressed form (all features of the international “new poetry” movement, ala Yone Noguchi, Stephen Crane, Adelaide Crapsey, et al.).

“I am sure that it is not needful to plead at any great length for the bright and unpretentious verses which make up this little book. The fiercest and most implacable of critics will, I am certain, after glancing through them, be prepared to take them in the spirit in which their Authoress has written and offered them to New Zealand readers. They aim at being short, simple sketches in rhyme, prompted by the feelings and incidents occurring in the every-day… Their merits are brevity, simplicity, and local colour. Because one does not discover in them the epic grandeur or the infinite variety of lyrical melody that one looks for and finds in the great masters of verse, it does not, therefore, follow that they are hastily to be dismissed as contemptible… With a quick eye for externals and a kindly sympathetic touch, Elms has been able to reproduce with truth many of the fleeting lights and shadows of New Zealand life. That success forms the raison d'être of this slender volume, to which I wish good speed, and which I am confident will give pleasure to not a few of my fellow-countrymen and women.” (W.P. Reeves, ‘Introduction’ in Lilts & Lyrics, 1893)

This is the second issue in a new series focussed on forgotten poets from Aotearoa/New Zealand. In the past few months I have started building an archival quality library of pre-1980s poetry from Aotearoa—something I talked about briefly in the last issue, featuring the poems of New Zealand poet Ursula Bethell—and I was recently able to track down a first edition copy of Randle’s Lilts & Lyrics of New Zealand, published in 1893;

Over 130 years old, the cover and inside pages look almost brand new, as if it had been sitting on a well shaded bookshelf or in a closet somewhere for most of its life. However, the binding has started to come away from the spine, and the front two pages have come loose, possibly showing that in its day it was well-read and enjoyed, as one hopes it would have been.

    
              —: After Wych Elm :—
                      by Dick Whyte

                            I.

       A conundrum—

                            II.

       ev’ry fire one day dies
       just ask the sun,

       no more i’ll set myself alight to keep you warm

                            III.

       no more waiting for the dawn!

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop



Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ MORE POETRY FROM AOTEAROA ┐

┌ MORE FROM THE BOOK OF LOST RHYMES ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT THE SKY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT RIVERS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT MOUNTAINS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT POETRY ┐


]]><![CDATA[Ursula Bethell - 7 Short Poems (1924-34)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/ursula-bethell-7-short-poems-1924https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/ursula-bethell-7-short-poems-1924Sun, 15 Mar 2026 20:03:54 GMT

Leo Bensemann - Fantastica: Thirteen Drawings (Caxton Press, 1937)


    
              —: Waves: A Beginning :—

       Now in the dark of night disposed
       Sleepwards, but aware meanwhile,
       (Night of cloud, sky speechless,
       Lights on alluvial plain muffled,
       Neighbouring hill-lights long extinguished,)
       Under the silence I hear
       Deep calling to deep.

       It is the surge of unplumbed seas
       Of being, from before time was;
       Fundamental urge of atoms;
       Slime-emergent, vegetable armies,
       Phytoplankton, mosses, grasses;
       Dirge of vast massy forests
       Passing away fulfilled.

       Incessant protoplasmic swell
       Of life impelled to ideal form;
       Cell to fellow-cell murmuring
       In dark arteries of supreme organisms
       Marine memories; the old oceans
       Curled shells record; salt streams
       Wherein all life was laved.

       No wind, that sound,
       But earth’s yearning sighs
       For answerer, for deliverer
       From too heavy burden
       Of bewilderment, of unspeakable
       Hid guilt, hidden hurt,
       Of terrible, hid joy.
     
   
              —: Spring Snow and Tūī :—

       We said: there will surely be hawthorn out
       down in the sun-holding folds of the hills by the sea;
       but suddenly snow had forestalled the thorns there,
       death-white and cold on their boughs hung
       the festival wreaths.

       It is all one. The same hand scatters the blossoms
       of winter and spring-time. The black-robed psalmodist,
       traversing swiftly the silent landscape like Azrael,
       echoed in clear repetition his well-tuned antiphon;
       a waking bugle it might be, a passing bell,
       of life, death, life, life telling: it is all one.
    
   
              —: Catalogue :—

       “Now is the time for planting shrubs.”
       Shall I plant shrubs? ‘Shrubs’ is an ugly word!
       When one says “shrubs,” I think of suburbs,
       Damp villas, desert isles, detective stories.

       (‘Bank’ is an ugly word——and yet one said
       ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme grows.’)

       Come, let me read this catalogue of shrubs,
       And choose out those with lovely-sounding names.
       Adenandra uniflora, Aloysia Citriodora,
       Iochroma Tubulosa, Podalyria Grandiflora,
       Melaleuca, Santolina, Lasiandra,
       Cantua, Cassia, Felecia, Luculia,
       Daphne . . .
       Shrubs. I am planting shrubs.
     
    
              —: Detail :—

       My garage is a structure of excessive plainness,
       It springs from a dry bank in the back garden,
       It is made of corrugated iron,
       And painted all over with brick-red.

       But beside it I have planted a green Bay-tree,
       —A sweet Bay, an Olive, and a Turkey Fig,
       —A Fig, an Olive, and a Bay.
    
    
              —: Prepare :—

       Not yet came spring, but the last lap of winter.
       Storms. Hail. Rain. Rain. Rain.
       Flowers all swept down. Birds silent.

       Then much hard toil. Much backache.
       Muddy boots. Scratched hands. Deep sleep.

       Then one morning a general greenness,
       And all the rose-bushes broken into leaf . . .
    
    
           —: 9th JULY, 1932 :—

       Grey sky, grey city-smoke;
       garden all gone bare, gaunt mountains;
       pitiful pipe of well-nigh homeless birds . . . .

       But then these stinging sun-roused messages
       tossed hither salt-cold, from the pacific sea;
       those foremost, dawn-dyed, rose-red eminences,
       those snow-fast, soon-to-be-incarnadined
            strongholds beyond . . .

       There shall be no insistence on symbolism;
       let each eye take the tokens, heart interpret,
       individual tongue make fit respond.
    
    
              —: Envoy :—

       Over and over, carefully to con
       ‘thy tablets, Memory,’
       myself accustomed, the one being gone
       who prompted all; night having fallen upon that territory
       where, season by season, we had watched unfold
       fugitive beauty; impotent and cold
       transcriptions, yet these now shall be
       thanks for felicity.

(Mary) Ursula Bethell (1874-1945) was born in London, but shortly after her birth her parents moved to Ōtautahi/Christchurch, in Aotearoa/New Zealand. As a teenager she returned to Europe and attended the Oxford School for Girls and a finishing school in Switzerland. Bethell then devoted herself to charity work, travelling between England and Aotearoa, before settling permanently in the Cashmere Hills, just outside of Ōtautahi, in 1924. With family money, she built a house with her companion Effie Pollen—also a recent returnee—known as ‘Rise Cottage’, “with a fine view of the plains levelling out to the foothills of the alps [where] she established a garden.” (Vincent O’Sullivan, 1950)

It was about this time—at age 50—that Bethell took up writing poetry, quickly becoming one of the earliest poets from Aotearoa to publish “new verse” in the 1920s—appearing in magazines like The Home and Art In Australia—followed by the publication of From a Garden in the Antipodes (1929), one of the earliest known solo collections of “new verse” by someone in Aotearoa, though published in England: “Bethell was surprised people admired her ‘garden’ poems, often written as casual messages to friends, or as modest celebrations of what occurred beneath her hands.” (Vincent O’Sullivan, 1950)

In the 1920s and very early-1930s there were no publishing opportunities for “new verse” of the kind Bethell was writing in Aotearoa, though there were a few kindred spirits floating around. Carl Straubel, another young poet from Ōtautahi, published his first collection of “new verse” in 1930, and went on to be a founding member of the Caxton Club, led by Denis Glover. In the early-1930s they published the radical ‘little magazines’ Oriflamme (April 1933)—featuring the poetry of Straubel and Glover, alongside Ian Milner and J. Patrick Robertson—and Sicorro (July 1933)—also featuring A.R.D. Fairburn.

Bethel’s partner Pollen tragically died in 1934, and Bethell stopped writing poetry. However, when Glover and Straubel (among others) founded the Caxton Press in the mid-1930s they quickly published two further collections of Bethell’s poetry, Time & Place (1936) and Day & Night: Poems 1924-34 (1939), now incredibly rare and difficult to locate. Though she no longer published new poetry, Bethell would go on to become a mentor-like figure for Glover, and when poet Charles Brasch visited her in the late-1930s he found her “the centre of an astonishingly diverse circle of interesting people,” including poets like Blanche Edith Baughan and J. H. E. Schroder, as well as artists, musicians, singers, thinkers, etc. (Indirections: A Memoir, 1980)

NOTE: All of Bethel’s poetry was initially published pseudonymously, with From A Garden In The Antipodes being attributed to ‘Evelyn Hayes’, Time & Place to “The author of ‘From A Garden’,” and Day & Night to “The author of ‘Time & Place’.” However, before the end of her life she made it known that she wanted her poems to be published under her own name, as they were in all subsequent (posthumous) editions. Though Bethell’s work has thankfully not been entirely “forgotten”—having a small resurgence in the 1950s, in part spurred on by the publication of two editions of her Collected Poems in 1950 (one edited by Helen Simpson for Caxton Press, and the other by Vincent O’Sullivan; both containing previously unpublished poems) and her appearance in An Anthology of New Zealand Verse, published by Oxford University in 1956—the breadth of her poetry remains woefully under appreciated, in my humble opinion.

This is the first in a new series for Forgotten Poets, dedicated to the early history of “new verse” and “free verse” from Aotearoa/New Zealand. Up until now, my research has primarily been in English and American poets, due to the quality of the online archives that exist for pre-1930s poetry. However, poetry from Aotearoa—and especially early “modern” or “new” poetry (i.e. pre-WW2)—is not well archived online, and primarily exists in a extremely rare ‘little magazines’ and difficult to locate (and expensive) chapbooks.

For this reason, I am starting a research library dedicated to pre-1930s poetry from Aotearoa. I already have a large collection of chapbooks, which I have managed to hunt down in op-shops and auctions (I have somewhere between 50-100 rare NZ chapbooks presently)—but I need help expanding it! So I am calling upon all those wonderful readers who might be interested in helping out with the project to donate to a fund for purchasing rare and expensive books from Aotearoa, which I will scan and make available online, so that researchers and poetry lovers can explore Australasian poetry with the same depth and dedication as American and English poets.

The first books I would like help getting for the library are Bethell’s Day & Night, the Caxton Press edition of Bethell’s Collected Poems (1950), and Poems: An Anthology by New Zealand Women Writers (1953). Day & Night, in particular, is an extremely rare chapbook from 1936, and the only of Bethell’s original books available for purchase at the moment. Right now there are two reasonably priced copies available online, for around US$140. There is also a nice copy of the Collected Poems for around US$50. Finally, Poems: An Anthology By New Zealand Women is an extremely rare collection—and one of the first of “new” poetry dedicated to women’s verse—and there happens to be a single copy available for around US$30 (the only I’ve ever seen online). If you would like to help out, click the link below, and choose how much you’d like to donate!

If you donate any amount to a book you will receive proof that your money was spent as I said it would be, as well as a professionally edited PDF of the book via email soon after I purchase it. Furthermore your name (and anything else you might like—a poem, a picture, etc.) will be included on a slipsheet included with the book, giving it’s provenance, and depending on the amount donated you’ll get free books from the Forgotten Poets back catalogue, and other special gifts. As time goes on, I’ll start building a more complete online archive cataloguing the collection for researchers and poetry lovers! This is a very new project and I am not sure if it’s the kind of thing anyone would support, so if you have any questions please feel welcome to get in touch.

      
              —: After Ursula Bethel :—
                         by Dick Whyte

       O home that i have both come back to
       & left,

       pour sunlight, moulded into the shape
       of a ribcage—my ribcage—
       skin-stretched & sure-faced—

       the world will not end,
       casting bones
                                                             in a cave
       curved like a mouth

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT SPRING ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT BIRDS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT FLOWERS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT GARDENS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT THE CITY ┐


]]><![CDATA[James Waldo Fawcett - 6 Short Poems (1915-21)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/james-waldo-fawcett-6-short-poemshttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/james-waldo-fawcett-6-short-poemsThu, 05 Mar 2026 12:27:17 GMT

William Sanger - “Mother & Child” (c. 1920s?)
   
              —: Lines in Defense of Vers Libre :—

       Build me no songs with paltry rule; 
       Bring me no verse of narrow school! 
       My heart demands the free! 

       Let no wild dream of mine be chained 
       Unto a prison unexplained! 
       Caged birds are ever sad. . .

       Sing as you will! Oh heart of mine! 
       The freedom you command is thine! 
       Be free, then, and be glad!
  
    
              —: A Great City At Night :—

       Cool, languid city,
       Sick with sleep,
       Dark hearted, silent.
       Mystic, deep,

       Wild haunted, tortured,
       Aged of wrong,
       Sordid, repulsive,
       Theme of song.
    
  
              —: Fragment :—

       Every happy man
       Is like
       Every other happy man.

       But an unhappy man
       Has no comrade
       Like himself.
   
   
              —: Untitled :—

       Day and dawn of time,
       Love and the soul of rhyme,
       Night and the evening chime,
       Life!
  
   
              —: Chant of Motherhood :—

       We have waited too long for men to make us free:
       We have waited through useless centuries 
       For love, for right, for truth, to loose our bonds, 
       For night to drift away before the day,
       For dawn to show a free, wide path,
       Soft for the tender feet of those sweet little souls 
       That grow beneath the beating of our hearts,
       Sheltered and kept by our pain-given tears,
       And calmed to rest by our own mother-song.

       Oh, you, who were sons and fathers,
       Where have you met our love
       With grateful heart devotion,
       With sense for pain and loss?

       Oh, you, who were sons and fathers, 
       Where have you met our love 
       With grateful heart devotion, 
       With sense for pain and loss?

       Now through the land runs the glad cry
       Of womanhood intent on being free,
       Of motherhood intent on being true.

       And womankind shall not be crushed
       Into the sorry dust again
       By children not the flower of love,
       By little lives for poverty to make
       Sad game of and destroy at last
       In the ruthless swirl of fate.

       We have waited too long for men to make us free!
       Now, light up the torch of truth,
       And let its beacon flame sing
       Through the whole wide world,
       Speaking of reason free of chains!

       We have waited too long for men to make us free!
    
   
              —: Waiting :—

       I do not sleep when others sleep;
            I wait and wonder, watch and weep.
       I make a little song in sorrow
            For those to sing who come tomorrow.

James Waldo Fawcett (1893-1968) “was a journalist and historian who lived in New York, Pittsburgh, and later Washington D.C. He served as secretary of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, contributing many articles and reviews to the society's quarterly magazine.” Fawcett began writing poetry in the mid-1910s and was part of the bohemian scene gathered around Guido Bruno in New York. Was also an advocate for women’s rights and birth-control, and published numerous poems in The Birth Control Weekly (1917).

William Sanger - “Margaret Sanger as Wonder Woman” (c. 1940s?)

Around the same time Fawcett edited the book Jailed For Birth Control (1915), documenting the jailing and subsequent “obscenity” trial of architect and artist William Sanger—husband of Margaret Higgins, feminist, birth-control activist, and the inspiration for the earliest incarnation of the Wonder Woman character—for distribution of birth-control pamphlets.

“William Sanger is an artist, not a scientist. He is a revolutionist, not a reformer. He thinks in large dimensions; his forte of expression is that of pen, pencil, and brush... I have never known Sanger to express any approval of anything anti-social; I have never found him tolerant of evil, of oppression, of injustice, of bitterness, or of unbrotherly struggle. But I have always found in him a ready sympathy and understanding of misery, unhappiness, and poverty. He is such a man as children love, and tyrants hate.” (Fawcett, 1917)

   
              —: After James Waldo Fawcett:—
                              by Dick Whyte

       children should be trusted—
       never tyrants!

       seems as simple as the setting sun,
       except it never
                                    set
       the earth turns
                                    into a rose

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT POETRY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT THE CITY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT LOVE ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT MOTHERS ┐


]]><![CDATA[A. Philip Randolph & James W. Randolph - 6 Very Short Poems (1926)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/a-philip-randolph-and-james-w-randolphhttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/a-philip-randolph-and-james-w-randolphFri, 13 Feb 2026 01:16:52 GMT

“In memoriam for Elizabeth Randolph, beloved mother of brothers Asa Philip and James W. Randolph.” (The Messenger, 1926)

   
              —: The Game :—

       Mother played with death,
       I drew the bye
       To match him in her stead
       Was all I craved.
       Death won.
   
   
              —: To William Campbell :—

       I heard him say:
       “Tis hard
       Stand to it.”
       But how hard?

       Winds will not tell
       Nor mountains, stars nor seas.

       Birds will not tell
       How hard.
   
   
              —: To My Collegians :—

       A brother answers
       When a brother
       Falls.
   
   
              —: Returning :—

       “There's something I could tell.”
       She whispered to my ear
       But people couldn't understand
       Why my heart was bursting.
       And yet I'll tell
       And this it is
       “What way shall I turn you mother?”
       “Son, turn my face
       Toward the Old Still.”
       This was the playground
       Of her childhood
       'Twas then that I knew
       She was passing.
    
    
              —: To Friends Whom She Did Not Know :—

       Hear from the tower of silence crying:
       Hail!!!
    
  
              —: A Letter :—

       Behold,
       Out of the night and day
       Through storm and crash of city
       Making way
       A healing come.

A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979)—the more famous of the Randolph brothers—was a civil rights activist, unionist, and later, publisher, who co-founded the black arts and culture magazine, The Messenger, with Chandler Owen and the help of the Socialist Party of America. Featuring the tag-line: “The only radical Negro magazine in America,” The Messenger was labeled by the the United States Department of Justice as: “The most able and the most dangerous of all the African American publications.”

“In addition to militantly championing Black rights, The Messenger spoke out on other issues. Thus, in 1918, while speaking in Cleveland against American participation in WWI, Randolph was arrested and later described by the Lust Committee as ‘the most dangerous Negro in America’.” (‘A Philip Randolph: Portrait of an Afro-American Radical’, in Black World, 1967) Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, later said of him: “No individual did more to help the poor, the dispossessed, and the working class in the United States than Randolph.” (Kathlyn Gay, American Dissidents, 2012)

The Randolph’s father—Reverend James William, of the militant African Episcopal Church—was a forward thinker who taught his sons “that race was a distinction without significance—that God was neither black nor white—that a person’s quality, not their color, was what mattered.” Their mother was a seamstress, and further instilled in them that “education was the key to future success.” This would lead to the brothers “attending the Cookman Institute in Jacksonville, Florida, with tuition money they had earned themselves.” There, “Randolph showed an early interest in acting, particularly Shakespearean drama… and in 1914 he helped organize the Shakespearean Society in Harlem, playing the roles of Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo.” (Black World, 1967)

Randolph would go on to the one of the most significant American civil rights activists of the 20th century, being responsible for “proposing the first civil rights ‘March on Washington’ in 1940-1941,” with Rustin and A.J. Muste, calling for an “an end to segregation and racial discrimination in war industries, the proposal of an anti-lynching law, access to defence employment, and the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces.” Randolph called off the march after President Roosevelt issued “Executive Order 8802—‘There shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defence industries or the government because of race, creed, color, or national origin’— creating the President’s Fair Employment Practice Committee.” (Black World, 1967) Though considered a significant early civil rights victory, many felt conflicted, including Rustin and Muste, as it only addressed inequality and discrimination in war industries, and not any of their other (extremely reasonable and overdue) demands.

This collection of tender poems—written in collaboration with his brother, and the only Randolph ever published, mostly in a ‘free’ and compressed style—are not mentioned in the any of the biographies or extensive literature on Randolph, and have not been anthologised or republished (or probably read) since their initial appearance in The Messenger in 1926.

Hi everyone—am moving house at the moment, so everything is up in the air! However, I will be reading some poems online, alongside and , this coming Sunday, at 4pm EST—10am Monday morning in Aotearoa, where I am—as part of a and organised Zoom poetry reading—‘We Are The Poem’—and I’m really looking forward to it. Hope to see you there!

    
              —: After the Randolphs :—
                       “Two Epitaphs”
                                by Dick Whyte

                      I.

       cicada, wild as you can be
       endlessly—
       measure me a swatch of sky,
       before you die

       then we'll see
       who can cry the loudest

                      II.

       ode to the old ones—

       crickets,
       instigators of night's indolence

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ MORE AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT DEATH ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT MOTHERS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT SILENCE ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT HEALING ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT BROTHERS ┐


]]><![CDATA[Iris Tree - 6 Short Poems (1917-1924)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/iris-tree-6-short-poems-1917-1924https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/iris-tree-6-short-poems-1917-1924Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:04:51 GMT

Curtis Moffat - “Flame” (1919)
   
              —: Dust Is Our Garment :—

       That her dust is our garment,
       Her fruits our endeavour,
       Her waters our priestess,
       Her leaves our interpreters to god,
       Her hills our infinite patience.
    
   
              —: Silence :—

       Silence
       Somewhere on earth
       There is a purpose that I miss or have forgotten.
       The trees stand bolt upright
       Like roofless pillars of a broken temple.
       There is a purpose in heaven,
       But for me nothing.
   
    
              —: Cold Light :—

       The cold light steals into my soul
       Revealing its emptiness,
       The cold winds batter at my heart
       And make its lonely tenant shake with fear
       The raindrops slide across the window-glass
       Like sighs that fall from patient weariness;
       And coldly smiling time
       Peers with his clock-face, ticking in my brain
       The pulse of a monotonous remorse.
   
   
              —: Old Iron :—

       Old iron rustling in the nettles
       Hoops and girds and battered slag
       Coils and wheels writhing twisted
       Sharp and fanged in the bitter grass.
       If I had a flute or a whistle
       If I were a fiddler
       I would play on that scragged pile, in rags I would sit
       Because of a melancholy mood
       I would make tunes, new tunes, bitter and wild
       Out of the snarl of those dead fragments.
       Iron out of the earth,
       Iron out of the fire,
       Black iron jangling upon iron
       Old Iron rusting red on the green—
    
    
              —: What You Will :—

       What is my sex and meaning and ambition?
       I am what you shall name me. Superstition
       Hangs on the lips of idols that are mute,
       Music is holy in the silent lute
       That waits the wings of every sleeping tone.
       You stand beside me—we are both alone.
       Where do I come from, go, what chains shall bind me?
       There is nothing before me or behind me,
       I come from all your margins, from your stress
       Of questioning, and I am the dividing guess
       Of life to dream. Or just a woman in a dress.
   
   
              —: Eternal Death :—

       Explosion petrifies. The balance of all things
       Hangs on a cross of doubt that stands alone
       In pyres of smoked-out chaos, amid rings
       Of dead light where the winds make hollow moan;
       Sands trickle from the empty watersprings.
       Time is suspended. On his nest of bone
       The Promethean eagle starves, under his wings
       The fiery egg is turned into a stone.
Curtis Moffat - “Smoke” (1919)

“Iris Tree (1897-1968)—poet and actress; daughter of the late Beerbohm Tree, the celebrated English actor; studied at the Slade School of Art—is now sojourning in Paris. Her first book, Poems, was issued in 1919,” (Poetry, 1923) with illustrations by her then husband, photographer Curtis Moffat. Tree published two more collections, The Traveller & Other Poems (1927)—before taking an almost 40 year hiatus from publishing—and The Marsh Picnic (1966).

“Tree is in a passion with the world. She voices, certainly with eloquence, a feverish desire to escape somewhere along 'the long road unto nothing' and a dolorous morbid hopelessness which, as a poetic motif, arouses rather pity than admiration.” (Wheels, 1917)

“Despite being a prolific poet, Tree is today remembered primarily as a muse for others, rather than as a creator—[both actress and poet]—in her own right… In obscure corners of the internet, she endures as an eccentric subcultural icon, but this quirky afterlife also relates to Tree’s image, rather than to her writing…Although a frequent contributor to Edith & Osbert Sitwell’s Wheels and Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, Tree is seldom included in surveys of modernist poetry, including those focusing on women’s verse. Critics have found space for Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, and Mina Loy… but Tree’s work—spanning from the 1910s to the 1960s—remains largely unanalysed.” (Sarah Parker, Gaudy Havoc: Iris Tree’s Performative Decadent Modernism, 2022)

Curtis Moffat - “Rockets & Ashes” (1919)
    
              —: After Iris Tree :—
                    by Dick Whyte

       I.

once in a thousand
years,
the mountains agree

       II.

a number of birds later:
a number of birds

       III.

a word is a map to the future

       IV.

but also i am grass woven
into a blanket

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ MORE FEMINIST POETRY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT SILENCE ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT POETRY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT DEATH ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT FRAGMENTS ┐


]]><![CDATA[Akiko Yosano - 8 Tanka (1901-1928)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/akiko-yosano-8-tanka-1901-1928https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/akiko-yosano-8-tanka-1901-1928Thu, 15 Jan 2026 20:36:43 GMT

   
       The heart of a woman of thirty
       Is a measure of fire,
       Having neither shade, nor smoke,
       Nor sound.

       It is a round sacred sun
       In the sky at evening;
       Silently,
       Penetratingly,
       It burns—burns.

                    tr. Eunice Tietjens

    
       Five piles standing in the river,
       Five crows sitting on the piles—
       It is maddening!
   
   
       Strange
       That you should make two of love
       When I make one.
   
   
       The worries of women
       Existed
       Even before this troubled age.
   
   
       Our home is filled
       With lonely struggles:
       You beat yourself,
       And I beat myself.
   
   
       My eyes,
       That have been buried in sleep
       In my arms,
       Awaken
       And are beautiful.
   
    
       A foot of green thread
       In a needle
       Moves gently,
       Stirred by the autumn wind.
    
    
       There are numberless steps
       Up to my heart.
       He climbed perhaps two or three.

Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) was born in Saki, near Osaka, and as a teenager began submitting shin’taishi (“new poetry”) and shin’tanka (“new tanka”) to Myōjō magazine, founded by Tekkan Yosano. Later, Akiko married Tekkan, and her poetry would go on to be a significant influence on both the shin’taishi and the shin’tanka movements, alongside her husband, and poets like Masaoka Shiki, Yanagiwara Akiko, and Kujō Takeko.

Akiko’s first solo shin’tanka collection みだれ髪 (Midare’gami; ‘Tangled Hair’) was widely read and especially popular among radicals and “free” thinkers of the time, particularly with regards to feminist discourses in Japan. This frightened the tanka establishment, who publicly attacked the book. Tanka poet and critic Nobutsuna Sasaki, for instance, claimed Akiko was “corrupting public morals” and “mouthing obscenities fit for a whore” because she composed tanka on the topic (dai) of breasts. Despite this—and equally because of it—Akiko’s work remained popular among radical poets and the general public alike, and she would go on to publish 20 tanka collections, becoming one of the most famous poets of the shintai’shi and shin’tanka schools.

Forgotten Poets is very proud to announce the first published edition of Hughes and Iwasaki’s translations of ‘new tanka’ poets Kujō Takeko, Akiko Yosano, and Akiko Yanagiwara, in over 100 years. Including the 1927 collection, Three Women Poets of Modern Japan, in its entirety, and various other translations of Kujō, Yosano, and Yanagiwara published between 1923-1928 (and originally left out of the book), for a total of over 120 tanka; with restored illustrations by Eiko Yonemura, a Japanese-born artist living in America in the late-1920s. Available now in both paperback and ebook!

This is a part of series of books Forgotten Press started published last year examining the early history of English-language tanka and haiku, also including the tanka of Jun Fujita and the haiku of Louis Alexander, with collections by Yone Noguchi and Amy Lowell coming soon!

Purchase

  
       —: After Akiko Yosano & Laurence Stacey :—
                    A Tanka Sequence
                            by Dick Whyte

                           ❖

       spring arrives, the world ends—
       don't remember me

                           ❖

       blossoms can damn well wait—
       it's the only life i get

                           ❖

       dead wasp pinned beneath a twig—
       we should all be so lucky

                           ❖

       feet in the dirt, head in the clouds—
       every death is a river

                           ❖

       laughter of children—
       most days i practice forgetting

                           ❖

       looks like rain—
       ghosts too are cast from the house

                           ❖

       dead flowers, plastic flowers—
       one handmade vase

                           ❖

       casting bones on a stone floor—
       listen! listen!

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop



Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ MORE FEMINIST POETRY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT LOVE ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT AGING ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT THE SUN ┐


]]><![CDATA[Joseph Upper - 7 Short Poems (1919-1926)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/joseph-upper-7-short-poemshttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/joseph-upper-7-short-poemsSun, 11 Jan 2026 11:08:55 GMT

   
              —: Inhibition :—

The night is pointed
With cruel stars,
And sharpened
By the steel war chant
Of ambushed crickets.

If there were a blood-red moon,
One could carefully
Kill the thing he loved
And bury it
Beneath a monumental pine tree.

But the cold bayonets 
Of the stars 
Prevent me;
And the revengeful crickets
Have made me weary of both love and hate.
   
   
              —: Storms :—

In the basin of the fountain, after the storm,
Plum-blossoms float dreamily.
The plum-tree, shorn of its dainty finery,
     gazes moodily into the water,
Resentment at its loss soothed by the
     peaceful contemplation
Of all those delicate petals dreaming
     on the still surface.

In my soul, after the storm,
There is no such peace.
   
   
              —: Excuse :—

When I look into your eyes
     I am reminded of a play I saw 
In which a woman, for love’s sake, cast herself
Into a flaming volcano; and I wonder
If I shall be foolish enough to do such a thing.
For your eyes are like a deep lake of fire
With jagged rocks of scorn at the bottom.
Shall I plunge shamelessly
     into this scornful hell of yours? 
When I look into your eyes for a long time, 
I think how foolish that play-woman was.—
     But she was helpless, too.
   
   
              —: History :—

It is in the story books that we read:
“And when the smoke of battle had cleared away. . .”
But you must remember:
The vanquished did not see this.
   
   
              —: We :—

None of us knows the way out of this wilderness.
This entangling undergrowth will be about us forever.
Each of us, with violent breaking and slashing,
Or with careful parting of branches and hesitating footsteps,
Makes for themself a path that leads nowhere.

Like the babes in the woods,
We shall tire ourselves out wandering circlewise,
And at last lie down exhausted, defeated,
Half forgetful that we are defeated;
And the leaves of autumn
And the snows of winter
Will weave over us
A covering of indifference.
   
   
              —: Starlight :—

The stars
Are numberless;
They are scattered thoughts of noble spirits,
Redeeming from insane futility
The blinding turmoil of an ugly world.

When I have turned my back upon my hopes,
I shall not curse life,
Because the stars
Believe in it.
    
   
              —: Query :—

They say the moon is without life,
Yet tonight it has made beautiful
A pile of dead leaves.

Can an exiled hope
Make beautiful
Decaying memories?

Joseph Upper Harris (1891-1954) was born in Watertown, New York; moved to Washington D.C. as a teenager, and worked as a government clerk. Wrote his first play at the age of 21; later collaborated with Agnew C. Blanchard on the melodrama Reveille (1914) and Harold B. Allen on the one-act farce At the Movies (1921). Began publishing poetry in the late-1910s, and appeared in various ‘little magazines’—including Pagan, The Modernist, Tempo, Troubadour, Bozart (et al.)—was a contributing editor for Star—Dust: A Journal Of Poetry, and published a volume of poems, Walking Shadows, in 1930.

   
              —: After Joseph Upper :—
                         by Dick Whyte

       blow wind, blow—once you were
                 a god

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT STARS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT CRICKETS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT STORMS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT LOVE ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT THE MOON ┐


]]><![CDATA[Mary Brent Whiteside - 6 Short Poems (1925-1928)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/mary-brent-whiteside-6-short-poemshttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/mary-brent-whiteside-6-short-poemsFri, 02 Jan 2026 19:11:46 GMT

   
       “And yet these storm-torn ancient trees will keep
              Inviolate secrets of the stars and dawn.”
                                      —from ‘Gethsemane’ (1925)
   
       “Life of the questing winds is theirs, these words
              That cry and scatter like a flock of birds.”
                                      —from ‘Frail Words’ (1925)

   
              —: Half Songs :—

       How little songs that never came to birth,
       Trouble the earth!
       Our fingers touch and let them pass;
       They vanish, whispering through the grass;
       Sweep like a sigh across a singing pine,
       And shine
       In the lost poetry of a blackbird’s flight.
       The amber flame of candle light,
       Catches and lets them go,—
       Perhaps because they tremble so!

       Songs that are finished, fill a page.
       Prisoned as birds are, in a cage,
       They live a century or a day,
       But little half songs—who shall say?
   
   
              —: Masters :—

       Call Shelley mad—a little;
       Blake was mad
       In half the revelations that he had,
       But there were three; the world’s supremest three,
       Whose genius was a super-sanity.

       No madness colored Shakespeare’s art;
       No darkness was in Homer’s heart,
       And Dante, master of that highest height
       Of which John only dared to write,
       Climbed where the steadiest heart and brain
       Alone could bear the glory and the pain,
       To win what only cloud-high brows adorn
       The master’s crown of thorn.
   
    
              —: Sunset :—
                         [opening stanza]

       For this, the fields have waited all day long,
       And wearying of song,
       After the chaliced dew is dry,
       The upward circling birds
       Spread like dark words,
       Across the open parchment of the sky.
    
    
              —: Words :—
                         [opening stanza]

       Sired by a primal need,
       Words were born of living things,
       For sensation gave them birth,
       Whether meant for sky or earth,
       Feet or wings.
    
     
              —: Beside A Minaret :—

       The rhythms of the call to prayer
       Are flower petals on the air,
       That lift and fall and lift again,
       Colored like windy cyclamen;
       Slow rhythms deep as violet dyes,
       With ivory edges, beautiful
       As dreams in half awakened eyes,
       The dawn is audible.

       As in a fight of silver words,
       Out of the sunrise hearts of birds,
       On wings that whisper and are gone,
       The dawn is audible—the dawn!
     
   
              —: Songs :—

       Many deaths have gone to build
       Every movement I have willed,
       That my life may be fulfilled.
       Many deaths, yet I have breath
       Still to sing of life and death.
       All the selves that died in me,
       Live again in melody.

Mary Brent Whiteside (1876-1962) was “born in Shelbyville, Tennessee, received her education at the Lucy Cobb Institute in Athens, Georgia, and through private instruction and special courses in English at Columbia University. In 1924 she was granted an honorary degree from Oglethorpe University. She is a member of the Poetry Society of America and of the Poetry Society of London. Her book, The Eternal Quest, appeared in 1925.” (The Lyric South, 1928) Later lived in Atlanta, and was on the editorial staff of the Southern Literary Magazine; and was the editor of ‘new poetry’ magazine The Stepladder.

“We shall not cavil with his omission of Sara Teasdale, as he offers what may be in some quarters considered an adequate excuse; we shall, however, complain at the blissful Passover which omits such leading women poets as Mary Brent Whiteside, Elinor Wylie, Jessica Nelson North, Lucia Trent, Elizabeth Coatsworth, and Genevieve Taggard.” (from a review of the anthology Women’s Poetry Today, in Bozart magazine, 1929)

“ATLANTA, July 19—Dr. Mary Brent Whiteside, poet and lecturer, died last Thursday in New Orleans. She had lived there in recent years with a sister, Mrs. Margaret W. Ellis. She was a native of Atlanta, where she spent much of her life. Many of Dr. Whiteside’s poems were published in England. Others appeared in The New York Times and other newspapers and periodicals during the last thirty-five years. Dr. Whiteside held an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Oglethorpe University in Georgia. She belonged to the Atlanta Writers Club and the Poetry Society of London.” (New York Times, 1962)

from ‘POETRY & HIGHER SPACE’
by Mary Brent Whitside (1919)

“It has been to the detriment of life in general, and of poetic art in particular, that throughout all ages the same minds have so rarely been interested both in mathematics and in poetry... Yet to understand poetry, or indeed any art, fully and completely is to understand the basic unity of life, and to grasp the essential fact that the same rhythm manifests through all its activities, with a difference solely in vibratory rate.”

“Poetic art is reducible to a mathematical science, but it is not the mathematics of the elementary classroom; it is that of higher space. And so far from limiting the field of poetic expression, or depriving the greatest of arts of that magic which is its divine heritage, such an admission serves as a potent password, opening to our enchanted gaze new and splendid vistas of wonder and beauty... For since the ‘music of the spheres’ is by no means a mere figure of speech, it follows that when the ‘morning stars sang together’, it was undoubtedly to the narrator a very real and audible harmony.”

“Henri Bergson in his famous definition of art has said, ‘Whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, it has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself,—Art is certainly only a more direct vision of reality’. Now since ‘reality’ here clearly does not refer to the physical world, at least in its more obvious aspects, it must relate to something apprehended upon that higher plane which mathematics designates as the ‘fourth dimension’, and to which metaphysics and occultism have given various names . . .”

While the shift from formal rhymed verse to ‘free’ and unrhymed verse in the late-1800s and early-1900s was important, even more significant was the shift from the ‘statement’ as the basic unit of poetry, to the fragment. In a poetry of statements ‘meaning’ resides in the poet, already completed, and it is the reader/critic’s job to decipher the ‘true’ meaning of the poem, in accordance with the poet’s ‘intentions’ (ala biblical exigesis). In a poetry of ‘fragments’, on the other hand, there are always multiple possibilities, di-verse potentials, and no one singular meaning. Sensible signification is abandoned in favour of suggestion. A fragment is always in-between and partial, and can only be completed by the reader in collaboration with the poet. A statement is already finished: a fragment invites the reader to continue, without stopping.

As Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space (1958): “Make of the reader a poet... the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost. At least the reader participates in the joy of creation that, for Bergson, is the sign of creation.”

   
              —: After Mary Whiteside :—
                                 [for B]
                                      by Dick Whyte

                      TONIGHT

       hope—in the way corn shoots hope
       into the sky!

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ BOOK OF LOST RHYMES ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT POETRY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT FRAGMENTS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT BIRDS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT DEATH ┐


]]><![CDATA[Adelaide Crapsey - A New Short Poem, Unread For Over 120 Years! (1901)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/adelaide-crapsey-a-new-short-poemhttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/adelaide-crapsey-a-new-short-poemWed, 31 Dec 2025 19:09:05 GMT

Merry xmas and a happy New Year y’all! Here is a wee present for everyone, something pretty special, if I do say so myself! I believe I have uncovered an un-acknowledged and entirely forgotten Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) poem. The ‘Vassar verse’ (as I have come to call it) was published without an author credit, as the frontispiece to the 1901 edition of the Vassarion, the yearbook published by Vassar College. At the time Crapsey was the Editor-in-Chief (pictured bottom-centre) and the entire contents was copyrighted to her. The poem appears in no other published form (at least not in any of the fairly extensive archives I have access to). Nor does it appear in Crapsey’s “complete” works, or in any of the academic discussions of her poetry.

    
              —: Dedication :—

       The distant infinite reveals,
       Lighthouses on the sea of life—
       Our womanhood's ideals.
       Today, like candles in our hands,
       We find these deep and close appeals
       That strong lives make with healing truth.

The themes of the ‘Vassar verse’ reflect on the history and ethos of Vassar College as one of the earliest “women’s schools” in the United States (and only the second to offer degrees to women). Their alumni would go on to include poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay and later Mary Oliver, and actresses like Meryl Streep, Jane Fonda, and Lisa Kudrow, et al.

While uncredited, the “Vassar verse” has an extremely similar mood and aesthetic to other poems of Crapsey’s from the same period, and I firmly believe it deserves a place in her complete works. Compare it to ‘Loneliness’, for instance, also published in the 1901 edition of the Vassarion;

    
              —: Loneliness :—

       The earth's all wrapped in gray shroud-mist,
       Dull gray are sea and sky,
       And where the water laps the land
       On gray sand-dunes stand I.
       Oh, if God there be, his face from me
       The rolling gray mists hide;
       And if God there be, his voice from me
       Is kept by the moan of the tide.

Or ‘Old Love’, from around 1905;

    
              —: Old Love :—

       More dim than waning moon
       Thy face, more faint
       Than is the falling wind
       Thy voice, yet do
       Thine eyes most strangely glow,
       Thou ghost . . . thou ghost.

Crapsey’s life flamed bright, but tragic. She was a gifted poet who was among the early adopters of ‘free’ and ‘new’ verse forms around 1905, innovated the first micro-form of “blank verse” around 1910—a 5-line poetic form known as the ‘cinquain’, using the Japanese tanka as a model—and produced one of the first truly “modern” analyses of prosody in A Study In English Metrics, published posthumously in 1918. While she died on the eve of the ‘new verse’ explosion of 1913-14, her work would go on to be celebrated by poets like Carl Sandburg and Lola Ridge, both of whom dedicated poems to Crapsey, and the ‘cinquain’ is one of the few “modern” English forms still practiced today.

    
              —: Adelaide Crapsey :—
                           by Carl Sandburg

       Among the bumblebees in red-top hay, a freckled
            field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow
            leaves in July,
                  I read your heart in a book

       And your mouth of blue pansy—I know
            somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.

       And I have seen a woman with her head flung
            between her naked knees, and her head held
            there listening to the sea, the great naked sea
            shouldering a load of salt.

       And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:
                 Mother of God, I’m so little a thing.
                 Let me sing longer,
                 Only a little longer.

       And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray conbers
            hauling new shapes on the beach sand.

Presenting research like this is the most exciting part of doing Forgotten Poets, and it happens all too rarely! This is only the second significant “re-covery” I have made in the dusty archives of early-1900s little magazines, the first being two long lost Langston Hughes poems. Here’s hoping 2026 turns up a few more forgotten gems of this stature!

    
              —: After Adelaide Crapsey :—
                             by Dick Whyte

                            I.

       Let us wear clothes when we want
       And none if we don't
           As if we won't
               Keep doing both, and—

       What does it matter
           Who really cares?
       Isn't it better
           To stay unawares?

                            II.

       When the emperor dies
           Everyone shouts—
       It's a helluva life
           Obeying these louts!

                            III.

       A coffin is no place for a poem,
       And yet—

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ BOOK OF LOST RHYMES ┐

┌ MORE FEMINIST POETRY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT LOVE ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT LONELINESS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT THE SEA ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT THE MOON ┐


]]><![CDATA[Maude Uschold - 2 Short Poems (1926-1935)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/maude-uschold-short-poemshttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/maude-uschold-short-poemsMon, 01 Dec 2025 23:24:25 GMT

   
              —: Departure :—

       Let me go, not slowly
       As one smothers in a cavern,
       Waiting doom
       Like the sad slow creeping
       Of northern dawn;
       But let me drop quickly
       Like tropic night,
       Like one breathless backward
       Step from a cliff.
    
    
              —: All Little Things :—

       A little song of birds at summer dawning;
       A little gust of tears when journey end;
       A little happiness, a little heartache;
       A little tenderness from friend to friend.

       A little wind that wakes the leaves at morning;
       A little rain that patterns in the dust;
       A little day that we may share together,
       Then go again our way as all we must.

       A little love that soon shall be forgotten,
       That being mortal, scarce will last the day;
       All little—O speak, declare against it
       A little word, scarce knowing what to say.

Maude Uschold (p. 1921-35, etc.) was a poet and “journalist from Lacon, Illinois.” (New Mexico Quarterly, 1935) Also a painter: “Uschold has some water-color paintings on exhibition…. [she] has more than ordinary talent and here’s hoping that she may win the prize.” (Lacon Home Journal, 1921) Little else is known of her life, beyond the poems above and these brief notes.

   
                                   Death Ballad
            —: After Maude Uschold & John Cage :—
                                    by Dick Whyte

     when death is ready
     to take me
     i will laugh loud
     and long:
     not because i am ready to go—

     (i will never be ready to go!)

     big moon
     will you be my guide?
     with your frayed blanket
     light?

     (i will never be ready to go!)

     stars too,
     with a glowing so old
     they sing

     (i will never be ready to go!)

     in the belly of time
     laughter is always

     (i will never be ready to go!)

     preferable to tears

NOTE: The final few lines reference an interview and performance John Cage gave on television in January, 1960 which has always stayed with me—his way of being seems so gentle and loving—and remains an endless source of inspiration to me in my own approach to poetry and life: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.” (John Cage)


Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ BOOK OF LOST RHYMES ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT DEATH ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT BIRDS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT SUMMER ┐


]]><![CDATA[Loureine A. Aber - 6 Short Poems (1921-1924)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/loureine-a-aber-6-short-poemshttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/loureine-a-aber-6-short-poemsTue, 25 Nov 2025 22:30:11 GMT

  
       —: My Littleness :—

Two pinholes in the curtain . . .
My eyes;
Two weeds flapping forlornly in a field of corn . . .
My hands.
And in the distance like a foghorn blowing  . . .
My heart.

I am no bigger than mountains,
Or mightier than stars,
The sphinx smells of me familiarly,
Daisies touch lips with me . . .
I shall be dust soon.
   
   
       —: We, The Musk Chasers :—

Gather us close, O stars, in your net.
We, the tired hearts of citizens,
We, the musk chasers
And the rainbow seekers.
Gather us close . . . . . . . . .
We, the lean fishers and folk undone.
Gather us close, O stars, in your net.
  
   
       —: This Flesh Of Fire :—

It is my body that suffers most from silence,
My soul can go off and gather stars;
Gaily, like swift flame leaping from the wood,
Or in the dusk of evening dream a whole life through.
But my body gets hungry.
It must have the feel of flesh against it.
And the noise of lips.
Why, God could build a pension house for souls.
And they would roost.
But oh, this flesh of fire
That burns one’s whole life through.
    
      
       —: If :—

If it were not for this dream upon me,
I should make my coin;
I should grind my way to fortune with the little wheels, 
I should count the flying heels my slaves to bind,
I should count the eardrums and the fingers mine. . . . 
But I keep thinking I can touch the sky
With my lips.
     
    
       —: Cut Loose :—

It comes prancing over pavements,
We shall be struck in the forehead sometime,
The Great Parade, the Great Celebration,
The Declaration of Independence.
And you will cut loose from the factory machines,
Fling down the bolts and nuts, the hammers and saws,
Shout your anathema at the smoke pots
	bulging on the horizon.

I shall break every pen in the penholder, write sacrilege
	on the face of the company’s note paper.
Cut loose, all of us.
Cut loose, with our timid, time-clock ways and our
	afraid-of-losing-a-job faces,
We shall make a hullabaloo—
	a giant parade for the stars to blink at!
    
   
       —: Four Corners of a Room :—

It is only four corners of a room
That keep me from becoming God.
I might leap out and spin stars,
I might address myself to grass
And long windy nights.
But these four corners hold me,
They have memories in them.

They will keep me fast . . . . . . . . . .
I am glad to be kept from being God.

Loureine A. Aber (1893-1930) was a graduate of Oberlin College. Lived in Chicago, and worked in advertising. Friends with Lillian Blackwell Dial. Published in various ‘little magazines’—including Poetry, The Lariat, Voices—and one solo collection: We, The Musk Chasers (1921).

This weeks “after” poem ended up in sequence form. As always, all sections can be read both as standalone fragments, and as an integrated verse.

In other news, massive thanks to everyone who’s already purchased my latest book of haiku, Same Old Moon! It’s been selling really well, and most of that is down to y’all. To those readers who did purchase a copy from Amazon—please consider leaving a review, as that really helps get the book more exposure. And to anyone out there who wants a copy but just can’t afford it right now, I have a few free PDFs to give away. Message me and I am sure we can sort something out. Hope everyone is having a good week. 

   
              —: After Loureine Aber :—
                          by Dick Whyte


            Anterior Axioms:

       awake as air awakes: ambitiously absent

       ants arriving—also aspirations

       at an ancient alter? always avoid answers

       an axe as well, achieving absolution

       all abstractions are attempts at abdication

       abracadabra! ask & ask & ask &


            Before Beginning:

       you shall be crammed
       into the light
       by a callous & uncaring god,

       i will address myself
       to grass


            Coda:

       make something useful
       you said,
       so we sang of trees
       & stones—

       & they were

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT MOUNTAINS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT STARS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT SILENCE ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT POETRY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT FLESH ┐


]]><![CDATA[Virginia McCormick - 4 Short Poems (1920-1926)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/virginia-mccormick-4-short-poemshttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/virginia-mccormick-4-short-poemsSat, 22 Nov 2025 21:25:21 GMT

   
              —: Mountains :—

       I turn my back upon the mountains,
       The lazy mountains
       Sleeping in the sun.
       They bring me peace,
       A profound satisfaction with self,
       A desire to rest always
       In the shadow of their beauty. 

       But life is short,
       So I turn my back upon the mountains
       And set my face to the sea;
       The sea, whose restlessness
       Spurs me to new tasks,
       To vast undertakings! 

       Verily life is short,
              And I would work,
                     Not sleep!
   
    
              —: Thought :—

       It is winter;
       Winds, fresh from the ocean,
       Blow through the house of my soul; 
       New thoughts are born . . .
       Instinct is awakened . . . 

       I seek words to clothe these,
       My thought-children,
       Born out of due season,
       To cover them from the cold,
       To conceal them
       From those who do not understand
       Their beauty, their frailty;
       To protect them from harsh contacts. 

       My body has acquired new life . . .
       Sensuous
       With the passion of spirit
       I turn my eyes to the coming spring. 
    
   
              —: The Shell: A Sonnet :—

       An elemental thing of air and earth,
       Close-welded by the ocean’s briny tears,
       The sun god stood beside you at your birth
       To fit you for the music of the spheres.
       I hold your lovely pinkness to my ear
       And hear the songs of far-away Japan;
       The evening call of shepherds, sweet and clear,
       Or echoes from the lilting pipes of Pan;
       The springtime chant of many a mating bird.
       Blue swallows chirping at the close of day,
       And lovers’ whispers by soft breezes stirred;
       The while a violin sobs and seems to pray.

       A thousand years you lay beneath the sea
       To gather songs from moon and stars for me.
   
   
              —: Poems :—

       Poems are but Earth’s lovely moments held
       By magic words in light captivity;
       Moments whose glowing beauty seems to weld
       Their own confining chains, or to set free
              Soul calling unto soul.
       Such winged fancies, breasting time and space,
       Light as a bird and fragrant as a flower,
       That each swift runner in Life’s hurrying race
       May pause to make them his for one sweet hour.

Virginia McCormick (p. 1921-26, etc.) “resides in Virginia. She is the author of a volume of poetry entitled Star-Dust & Gardens.” (Tempo, 1921) “President of the Poetry Society of Virginia, and one of the founders and editors of [the poetry magazine] The Lyric.” (Poetry, 1926)

   
           —: After Virginia McCormack :—
                           by Dick Whyte

       mountains stitching
       sky to earth

       in a jagged rush
       of old stars—

       sing like the dead
       can hear you

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT MOUNTAINS ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT WORK ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT WINTER ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT SPRING ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT POETRY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT THE GODS ┐


]]><![CDATA[Kujō Takeko - 11 Tanka (1920-1928)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/kujo-takeko-11-tanka-1920-1928https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/kujo-takeko-11-tanka-1920-1928Tue, 18 Nov 2025 02:10:35 GMT

   
       When the haze of spring evening
       Enfolds the feet of the western mountains,
       Then am I lonely for you.
   
   
       I see the haze in the east
       And in the west;
       Spring has returned,
       But you have not.
   
    
       So deep was my thought
       That for two days
       I did not dress my hair.
       Was it sad, I wonder,
       At my neglect?
    
   
       To think that from opposite ends of the earth
       We two are looking at the selfsame moon!
       How helpless mortals are!
   
   
      Out in the bright spring weather
      The other women play with their children.
      I pick wildflowers alone.
   
   
       Spring night.
       Silence.
       The rustle of my dress
       Falling to the floor.
       Silence.
    
    
       All the blood in my body is frozen;
       Only the cold sword of reason
       Flashes within me.
   
   
       It is futile to shed tears.
       I shall gaze at the clear moon,
       Forgetting everything.
   
        
       I do not know
       If it be the fire of God
       Or the fire of Satan?
       But where its light leads me
       I will go.
    
    
       I am wrapped in silk
       The color of flame,
       But my body—my bosom—
       Is cold.
    
    
       The sinking sun
       Is the soul of a giant;
       Like my soul
       It is bloody and burning.

Kujō Takeko (1887-1928) was born in Kyōto; her father was Ōtani Kōson, the head of the Honganji-ha Jōdo Shinshū branch of Japanese Buddhism, and her mother was the daughter of a samurai; as a result she was encouraged to study at what would become the Kyōto Women’s University. As a teenager she co-founded one of the first 婦人会 (Fujinkai; ‘Buddhist Women’s Associations’) within Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, a major Buddhist school headquartered at the Nishi Hongan-ji temple in Kyōto, and became active in humanitarian work, particularly during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, helping soldiers and families who had lost their sons and fathers in combat.

In 1909 Takeko was betrothed to Baron Kujō Yoshimasa—in an arranged marriage— and moved to London while Yoshimasa studied at Cambridge University. After a year she returned to Japan without Yoshimasa, and the two lived apart for most of their lives. During the 1910s, Takeko studied tanka under Nobutsuna Sasaki, and her work would go on to be a significant influence on the shintai’shi (“new poetry”) and shin’tanka (“new tanka”) movements.

During the 1920s Takeko published two solo collections of tanka—金鈴 (Kin’rei; ‘Golden Bell’, 1920) and 薫染 (Kun’zen; ‘Good Influence’, 1928)— and a play 洛北 (Rakuhoku; ‘North Kyōto’, 1925) before contracting blood poisoning in 1928 due to overexertion during the reconstruction efforts after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, and died not long after. The last years of her life were spent setting up the Asoka Hospital in Tokyō, one the first “modern” medical centres in Japan, which opened in 1930, two years after Kujō’s passing.

The translations were done by Glenn Hughes and Yozan T. Iwasaki, and use a ‘free form’ structure of 3-5 short to medium length lines, to approximate the 32 kana of tanka. While classical tanka were typically printed in one-line, with an internal 5-7-5-7-7 rhythm, shin’tanka of the 1910s and 1920s frequently employed alternate structures—in both Japan and America—such as Takuboku Ishikawa’s Japanese three-line tanka, and Yone Noguchi and Jun Fujita’s four-line English-language tanka. Hughes and Iwasaki were also influenced by Imagist poetics, which had itself been influenced by tanka and haiku translations of the late-1800s and early-1900s, a decade or two earlier.

“A considerable number of tanka and hokku have been translated into English, especially during this century. Some of these translations, which have given pleasure to innumerable readers, and hints to many poets, have been cast in conventional Occidental forms. The rhymed quatrain has been employed most frequently. Now such renderings seem to the present translators inappropriate. An uncharacteristic musical value is introduced by the use of rhyme, and the difficult matter of giving accurate expression to the content is made doubly difficult by adherence to a definite stanza form.

“[Instead, we feel] ‘free verse’ poems, as brief as possible, not too musical nor yet too prosaic, seem best to convey to Western ears the sense and effect of the original. Fully cognizant of the inadequacy of any method of translation, we commend these miniatures to those who admire the delicate and impressionistic in poetry.” (Glenn Hughes, 1927)

Forgotten Poets is very proud to announce the first published edition of Hughes and Iwasaki’s translations of ‘new tanka’ poets Kujō Takeko, Akiko Yosano, and Akiko Yanagiwara, in over 100 years. Including the 1927 collection, Three Women Poets of Modern Japan, in its entirety, and various other translations of Kujō, Yosano, and Yanagiwara published between 1923-1928 (and originally left out of the book), for a total of over 120 tanka; with restored illustrations by Eiko Yonemura, a Japanese-born artist living in America in the late-1920s. Available now in both paperback and ebook!

Purchase

This week’s “after poem”—a very ‘free’ tanka sequence—is also inspired by the work of Orrin Préjean, a contemporary English-language haikai (specifically, senryū and tanka) and shintai’shi poet from Louisiana, who’s work I am currently editing into a book. He’s previously published 3 collections—which I highly recommend—and posts a variety of poems on BlueSky. In a similar tradition to Hughes & Iwasaki, Orrin writes shin’tanka in unrhymed rhythms within a variety of lineages and lineations.

    
 —: After Kujō Takeko & Orrin Préjean :—
                    A Tanka Sequence
                          by Dick Whyte

                           ❖

       walking to see a dead shark—
       sudden fragrance of life

                           ❖

       children on the river's edge—
       becoming rock, becoming mud,
       becoming algae

                     ❖

       bank of black swans—everyone family

                     ❖

       dog with nose in rocks—
       ancient the smell of salt

                     ❖

       dead starfish returned to the river—
       let me be as lucky this time

                     ❖

       seagull filled sky—
       this fragmented world
       like a scream into the clouds

                     ❖

       charred wood damp on the sand—
       this life's about the same

                     ❖

       untangling the fishing line—
       her father calls me son

                     ❖

       say thankyou to the river—at least twice

                     ❖

       already feels like summer—
       the iridescence of roses in a garden,
       the iridescence of this feeling

                     ❖

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ MORE TANKA ┐

┌ MORE FEMINIST POETRY ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT SPRING ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT LOVE ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT THE MOON ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT THE GODS ┐


]]><![CDATA[Alfred Hitch - 5 Very Short Poems (1913-1920)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/alfred-hitch-5-very-short-poems-1913https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/alfred-hitch-5-very-short-poems-1913Tue, 11 Nov 2025 21:51:47 GMT

    
              —: Alone :—

       I walk the streets restless, unknown,
       Then back to this one room, alone.
       I turn and fret in aimless quest
       And fruitless yearnings unexpressed.
       I curse the silence of the years;
       And life-long worries grow to fears
       And fierce regrets none understands—
       Feeling my life slip through my hands.
    
    
              —: Modern Love :—

       Although she left me for a greater love,
       And though my life went out with her,
       I opened wide the door
       And blessed her ere she went.
       Love shall not make
       Me tyrant or a murderer.
       I want no love that is not free to love.
    
    
              —: A Hero :—

       Here’s to the soldier-hero
       With cross of honor won in
       Dishonorable war.
       To prove the man, it needs not
       The cause be just, for folly
       Or crimes will go as far.
    
    
              —: California :—

       Emigrants—
       Westward to California,
       Sunset and dreams—

       But the sun still sets in the west
       And the ocean rolls between us and our dreams.
    
    
              —: Arizona :—

       The mountains rise abrupt and angular
       From the plain, dry and bare.
       Rock and sand heaped pell-mell on
       The desert floor, the fragments of a world,
       Cleft by an ancient water-course,
       The dried-up river of time.
       A lizard, see, on some forgotten errand
       Has fallen asleep.
       A giant cactus stands,
       With headless trunk and blunt arms stretched,
       Imploring, to the sky.

Alfred Hitch (p. 1906-1920) was a poet from Arizona, published in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry (1913), The Poetry Journal (1914), and Out West, among others. Hitch published at least two solo poetry collections—Rhapsody (1906) and Poems & Essays (1920)—and a pamphlet on relativity, The Concrete & The Abstract (1942). Little else is known of their life.

“Here is a description of the universe [as described by] Einstein: ‘To sum up, a soap-bubble with irregularities and corrugations on its surface is perhaps the best representation , in the terms of simple and familiar materials, of the new universe revealed to us by the theory of relativity. The universe is not the interior of the soap-bubble but its surface, and we must always remember that, while the surface of the soap-bubble has only two dimensions, the universe-bubble has four—three dimensions of space and one of time. And the substance out of which this bubble is blown, the soap-film, is empty space welded on to empty time’.” (Hitch, The Concrete & The Abstract, c. 1941)

This weeks’ “after” poem was also inspired by and her wonderful newsletter ; in particular the ‘The Hidden Work of Beetles’. Thanks as always for the inspiration Ann! 

    
              —: After Alfred Hitch :—
                               (for Ann Collins)
                       By Dick Whyte

       there will be no more
                     there will only be more,

                     of a bowl
                     of beetles & stars:
                     we dream

       only when our bellies are full

Also, for anyone who might’ve missed it, I put out a new book of haiku this week, Same Old Moon—my first standalone solo collection—available in paperback and ebook. Many thanks to from for posting a wee video (my author copies are taking a while to arrive, but thankfully, orders are going out quick smart!). Big thanks to for sending some photos through as well. Much love!


Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poems & Prints: a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print short poems & prints from the late-1800s and early-1900s.

┌ BOOK OF LOST RHYMES ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT LOVE ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT WAR ┐

┌ MORE POEMS ABOUT LIZARDS ┐

]]><![CDATA[Kenneth Slade Alling - 6 Short Poems (1923-24)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/kenneth-slade-alling-6-short-poemshttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/kenneth-slade-alling-6-short-poemsWed, 08 Oct 2025 19:47:47 GMT

    
              —: To One Who Asked :—

       Ah, what are poems? There is a kind of tree
            that, bruised, bleeds golden blood into the sea.
       And now you need not ask again of me.
    

    
              —: Stones Gathered For A Chimney :—

       These are less soluble in time,
       that slow, slow acid,
       Than you or I or any of the tall trees here:—
       these gray faced stoics
       come out of the earth’s wind opened caves.

       They know a dull endurance:
       a harsh undissipated life is in them,
       like night in an abyss.

       They learned resistance in that early thunder blow
       which split the universe to separate stars,—
       and you and I who go
       above them now
       shall shortly lie below.
    
      
              —: Summer Night :—

       Like a bell note
       Shivered into fragments of fine sound:
       The summer night.

       But silence and the stillness do astound
       Me more than all this strange-go-round
       Of multitudinously minted chords along the ground.
       This is an edifice of silence, vast:
       Into the chinks of silence sound will creep
       A little while—and fall asleep,
       Its strength being spent and past.

       They say the crickets sing all night:
       I know
       They strike against the walls of silence,
       Insistently, a futile blow.
      
    
              —: Ferns :—

       The fronds of ferns uncurl like growing granite.
       Some stones that blossomed on another planet
       Scattered their seeds and the wind thrust one here
       To germinate an aeon and a year.
       Oh, something terribly abysmal burns
       In me when I perceive uncoiling ferns.
    
    
              —: February Thaw :—

       Now these ephemeral glaciers move,
       And racked apart by rain and sun,
       Disintegrate; and with strange cries,
       A thousand crying rivers sun.

       Not yet the spring and singing frogs;
       But these bright rainbows of the ground
       Are promises, and they are words,
       And occult ecstacies of sound.
    
    
              —: Crickets :—

       In indolent insistency
       The cricket rings its writhen bell;
       And other tunes it has as well;
       Small, strange star mimicry.

       And the multitudinous delicacy
       Of grass blades dripping with the moon
       Echoes and echoes quietly
       The cricket’s tune.

Kenneth Slade Alling (1887-1966) was “Born in Paugasset, New Haven, in British Colonial America. He married Elizabeth Mantle Whittlesey on 14 April in 1925 after moving to New York City. They first lived in Manhattan, before moving to North Wilton, in Connecticut, sometime before 1940.” (FamilySearch.org) In the early-1920s Alling was the editor of the underground poetry magazine The Measure. Little else is known about his life.

    
                             After Kenneth Alling
              —: Notes from the Book of Letters :—
                                  by Dick Whyte

                     I.

       words, like grass—
       proliferate!

                     II.

       communicate! commensurate!
       commentate! commissionate!
       celebrate! commemorate! commiserate!
       commediate!

       congregate! collaborate! cooperate!
       convergate! conspirate!
       combinate! combinate! combinate!

                     III.

       & language
       loosening letters—

       learn!
       laugh! lust! love!
       laud! lambast!
       lament!

                     IV.

       W          O          R                     D
       W                       R          I          T          Æ
                                  R         Æ         D

       M          Æ         R                      D           ←

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poets Presents:

Forgotten Poems, a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print poetry from the late-1800s and early-1900s. Explore the archives:


More from The Book of Lost Rhymes . . .


More poems about poetry . . .


More poems about stones . . .


More poems about summer . . .


More poems about spring . . .


More poems about frogs . . .


]]><![CDATA[Miriam Cassel Matthews - 5 Short Poems (1927)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/miriam-cassel-matthews-5-short-poemshttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/miriam-cassel-matthews-5-short-poemsSat, 27 Sep 2025 11:02:32 GMT

    
                —: A City :—

       A heavy fog
       Dripping with rain.
       Sticks to the valley;
       Sticks like a stamp to paper.

       A late dawn
       With slow, rosy fingers
       Rubs over that gray opaqueness,
       Tossing off the rough fragments of mist
       Until the last thin layer
       Is transparent enough
       To show
       An old stone bridge,
       Alleys bordered with houses,
       Smokestacks towering above steel mills,
       And in a small park among tall buildings
       A bust of Father Johns.

       From the decalcomania fog
       Is transferred a city.
    
  
              —: The Battle From A Distance :—

                     I.

       Through the night a light gleamed 
       Like that from pewter in a darkened room,

       Or like a camp fire
       Reflecting on the guns,

       Or like a flame of lightning 
       Above low mist.

                     II.

       There was a sound of birds 
       Flying in the distance.

       Perhaps, the gleam of brightness 
       Was the moonlight
       Glistening on the shears of Atropos 
       As they snipped off the lives of soldiers!
  
    
              —: Reconstruction :—

       War,
       Ruin and darkness,
       Ashes and desolation!
       Perhaps thou art
       The lattice
       In the stained-glass casement 
       Of dawn.
    
    
              —: You Are Lilac Blossoms :—

                     I.

       You are lilac blossoms,
       And I, wild grass swaying beneath.
       Upright I grow
       Catching the fragrance of your presence.

                     II.

       You are blue binding sky,
       And I, meadows sloping westward. 
       Secure I dream
       Feeling the soft contour of your arms.
     
    
              —: Slag :—

       With your breath upon me
       My love flames high with garnet sparks
       Like a furnace of molten steel,
       Windblown.

       Having felt the breath of God,
       Are the stars
       Mere smoldering slag
       Fallen from an immortal crucible.
       Where souls are in the making?

Miriam Cassel Matthews (1894-1987) was born in Marietta, Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, and spent most of her life living in Southmont, Pennsylvania. She contributed regularly in poetry magazines during the late-1920s, and published at least two collections of poetry, Spring Interludes (1927) and New Wood (1938). Little else is known of her life.

“A gentle philosopher savoring of a sweet soul with but little self-consciousness. Poems of rich colour.” (The Lariat, 1927)

    
              —: After Miriam Matthews :—
                            by Dick Whyte

                            I.

       WHEN I FELT SAFE
       I REMEMBERED HOW TO LOVE

       things as they are,
       not as we would have them be—

                            II.

       ADVICE FOR THE SUN:

       O burning ball of light
       what use are you,
       if you cannot heal the sky?

       heal yourself

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poets Presents:

Forgotten Poems, a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print poetry from the late-1800s and early-1900s. Explore the archives:


More poems about the city . . .


More poems about war . . .


More poems about flowers . . .


More poems about the gods . . .


]]><![CDATA[Ethel Romig Fuller - 4 Mountain Poems (1927-28)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/ethel-romig-fuller-4-mountain-poemshttps://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/ethel-romig-fuller-4-mountain-poemsFri, 12 Sep 2025 13:06:35 GMT 

     
              —: Dawn & New Snow :—

       On the mountain
       Dawn and new snow.

       New snow
       Smoky grey as wild asters,
       Frosted like spruce needles,
       Lupin blue,
       Briar-rose pink.

       New snow
       Veined crimson in black canyons;
       Penciled in sudden silver
       On high ledges.

       The kneeling trees at timberline
       Are cowled in white wool;
       The rocks are mauve-feathered
       Like the breasts of doves;
       The shadows of the rocks
       Are muted purple.

       Dawn . . .
       New snow . . .
     
         
              —: This Mountain :—

       And I shall have this mountain as memory
       Always.

       For sleepless nights
       It shall be a cool pillow,
       Moon-linen,
       Quilts of dusks—
       Satin, dull-blue, filled with down of shadows—
       Water shall sing under ice.
       There shall be soporific of pines,
       Ancient winds,
       Peace.

       For moments of exultation
       Dead rocks shall leap into space,
       Madly.
       At the misstep of a glacier
       Stable ground shall quake
       With Brobdignagian tremors.
       There shall be mutability of certitude,
       Tragedy of triumph.

       For vigil
       There shall be thrill of an ascent;
       Crevasses to skirt,
       Arêtes to traverse, step by step, by step,
       Footholds to be hacked in green ice,
       The tug of an encircling rope.
       There shall be bubbles of steam
       Blown from the lips of fissures,
       And the sulphuric breath of a sleeping monster;
       And at length,
       A dizzying last peak conquered—
       The top of the world;
       Heaven within the toss of a voice!

       For joy
       There shall be mountain-noon,
       White-hot, white-cold;
       Acres of glazed snow, sun-facetted;
       Innumerable lava-green cataracts.
       A dazzling hour,
       And frangible.

       For pain
       There shall be anodyne of dawns,
       Frosted-silver, rose;
       Blue flowers at the edge of snow,
       Avalanche lilies.
       There shall be tortured trees at timber-line
       Enduring . . .

       For fever
       Water dripping from snow,
       Breath of snow.

       For black sorrow
       Glaciers dying, to give life to rivers;
       Clouds, the avatars of waters lost in seas;
       Beauty transcending beauty!

       The forever behind forever!
    
    
              —: Concerning the Speech of Mountains :—
                                            [excerpts]

       Mountains talk;
       The lowest mountains speak the folk tongue of forests
       Wherein the sweet shrill tones of green heights
       Commingle strangely with the deep gutturals of canyons;
       A tongue rich with the idioms of wind and rain and snow,
       Poignant with the frail pink of rhododendrons,
       Sibilant with rustling leaves and running water,
       Bitter with tang of cedar and fir,
       Accented with the precision of sword ferns,
       Punctuated by falling cones and blue wings,
       Its quaint and ordered forms
       Older than ruins,
       Lovelier than psalms,
       More potent than benisons of priests . . .

       Mountains talk;
       The loftiest mountains, still cowled in mystery,
       Commune with the prophets,
       And interrogate the stars.

       Mountains talk;
       Their language is a composite
            Of all peoples,
            Of all lands,
            Of all ages,
            Of all planets,
            Of all seas.
       Its fundamentals are beauty.

       I am studying the language of mountains.
    
    
              —: Discovery :—

       And what did you find on the mountain top?
       New horizons and a sheer blue drop
       Down a glacial slope to depths below;
       A thin, cruel wind and fields of snow.
       Far to the east, gold that was grain;
       To the north tall ranges bent under rain;
       Green to the west pencilled in by the sea;
       Clouds to the south between earth and me;
       An eagle's feather on a ledge-like shelf,
       And a great strange God that was myself.

Ethel Romig Fuller (1883-1965) was born in Big Rapids, Michigan. In 1906 she moved Portland, Oregon, fell in love with the landscape, and after climbing Mount Hood dedicated herself to writing poems about the southwest; “Possessor of ‘a husband, two sons, and a most happy home’, Fuller is a Portland writer who has often appeared in The Lyric West, and in other California and Eastern publications.” (The Lyric West, 1927)

Fuller went on to publish three books of poetry, showing her skill at both both rhymed and unrhymed forms of “new” poetry: White Peaks & Green (1928), Kitchen Sonnets & Lyrics Of Domesticity (1931), and Skylines (1952). While her poems address many aspects of the Oregon landscape, the mountain ranges—and especially the Cascade Range, containing Mount Hood—were particularly significant to Fuller, both physically and metaphysically.

Fuller was also an editor, and in the 1930s when the local newspaper The Oregonian announced it was going to stop publishing poetry, Fuller “persuaded the paper to create a weekly poetry section, insisting that poems from all over the world be published, not only those from Oregon, [which] she edited from the early 1930s to the late 1950s.” (Hill, Oregon Encyclopedia, 2022) Fuller's own work continued to grow in popularity as well. In 1939 the New York Times reported that her poem 'Proof' was the most quoted poem in the English language, and in 1957 she became Oregon's third Poet Laureate.

Mountain illustration by Virginia deS. Litchfield.

        
              After Ethel Romig Fuller
                       by Dick Whyte

                            I.

       what the mountain taught me:

       there is something beyond exhaustion,
       trees will not judge you,
       the sky is a mighty long way,
       silence is not the absence of sound,—

                            II.

       ah! the valley approaches, emptying itself
       of synthetic gods,
       like a sack trying to hold a river:

       we leak

POETRY PROMPT

It seems like people have been enjoying the poetry prompts, so I figure I’ll keep offering them. This week, write a very short (say, under 10 lines) “after poem” (i.e. written “after” reading someone else’s work) in response to Fuller’s discussions of mountains—and my response to Fuller, if you’d like—with as much or as little connection to her (or my) work as you’d like—including none at all—and post it in the comments. Happy writing!

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poets Presents:

Forgotten Poems, a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print poetry from the late-1800s and early-1900s. Explore the archives:


More poems about mountains . . .


More poems about snow . . .


More poems about children . . .



More poems about the gods . . .


]]><![CDATA[Various Poets - Fragments Vol. 1 (1928-29)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/poetic-fragments-vol-1-1928-1929https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/poetic-fragments-vol-1-1928-1929Thu, 04 Sep 2025 12:09:08 GMT

On any given “work” day I might read a few hundred poems, pouring through old publications, cataloguing the poets that catch my eye. Along the way I find a lot of verses that—while not to my taste—have a few lines or ‘fragments’ which leap off the page, capable of sustaining themselves as standalone short poems. Here are a few I’ve collected recently, mostly while looking through the 1928-1929 run of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine;

    
              —: R.E. Hieronymus :—

       Flash, O primordial power unleashed!—
       Shake off the sleep of a million years.
    
    
              —: Louis Golding :—

       He behind the straight plough stands:

       Naught he cares for wars
       and naught
       For the fierce disease
       of thought,

       Only for the winds . . .
       Only for the soil . . .
    
   
              —: Clark Ashton Smith :—

       No shining words
       of stone—

       Shadows and cloud
       alone—

       These shall the poet seek.
   
       
              —: Ralph Cheever Dunning :—

       I'll show you
       as a lover should

       A man who loves
       a woman well

       Can love her as
       a woman would.
   
   
              —: Herbert Gerhard Brunken :—

       The stain of sleepless water falling
       like melted lead . . .
       timeless like subterranean snow:

       “We are not dead
                       but only sleeping”
      
   
              —: Ethel Romig Fuller :—
   
       Mountains talk;
       Their language is a composite
            of all peoples,
            of all lands,
            of all ages,
            of all planets,
            of all seas . . .

       I am studying the language
            of mountains.

Been on a bit of hiatus recently. Had some other projects to get done, including a new book of my own poetry, my first full-length book of haiku translations, and a new website. More news soon! Hope everyone is well, and we’ll return to our usual programming next week.

         
              —: Fragment :—
                          by Dick Whyte

       whatever's been forgiven gives
       four gifts, all wrapped in linen—

       an earthen jug—
       a wooden bowl—
       a sack & a map to a river—

       [ . . . ]

POETRY PROMPT

Read through the poems above, and take note of any lines or phrases which strike you as interesting. Use these notes to construct a poem, adding as little or as much to the original as you feel is necessary. Post the results in the comments below, I’d love to have a read!

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poets Presents:

Forgotten Poems, a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print poetry from the late-1800s and early-1900s. Explore the archives:


More poems about stones . . .


More poems about snow . . .


More poems about mountains . . .


]]><![CDATA[Alice M. Fay - 5 Short Poems (1912-24)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/alice-m-fay-5-short-poems-1912-24https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/alice-m-fay-5-short-poems-1912-24Mon, 11 Aug 2025 12:49:22 GMT

    
              —: Where? :—

       Where is the life of the lily
       That so proudly reared her head?
       Where is the radiant beauty
       Of the rose that was warm and red?
       Where is the smoke of the incense
       That vanished into the air?
       The scent of the violet, the song of the singer,
       Where, oh, where?
    
    
              —: Manifestation :—

       I drift bright poppies on the hillside,
       I am the urge of the insistent sea,
       I call to you from far-off, dim horizons,
       And quiet places speak to you of me.
    
    
              —: Near Crete :—

       The moonlight shines on the broad calm sea,
       Near the rocks by the Cretan shore,
       And the waves are whispering tales to me,
       Of the ships that will sail no more.
    
    
              —: Beyond :—

       How often have I wished that I might see
       Beyond the veil of future's mystery;
       A little while, a little space, that I
       Might see beyond the cloudless, star-lit sky,
       That realm, that sphere, untenanted by men,
       Beyond, above, a little while, and then—
    
    
              —: All This Is Thy Love To Me :—

       Like a fair and radiant flower,
       In the early dawn of spring,
       Like the song the seraph angels
       In heaven surely sing,
       Like a star on the dim horizon,
       When the evening shadows fall,
       And we feel a veil of darkness
       Will soon envelop all;

       Calm and serene as the mountains,
       Fathomless as the sea,
       Mysterious as the future,
       All this is thy love to me.

Alice M. Fay (p. 1912-24, etc.), was a poet and illustrator from New York. She published her first book of poetry The Realm of Fancy: Poems & Pictures in 1912, and was featured in numerous ‘little magazines’ of the 1920s, including Rhythmus (edited by Oscar Williams) and Pegasus (edited by W.H. Lench). Other than this, little is known of her life.

into air—
the scent of a violet sings!

Both Fay’s drawings and verse are comprised of accomplished line-work and subtle, suggestive forms, drawn from the ephemerality of the natural world. ‘Where’, for instance, is a delicate micro-treatise on poetics, in which the scent of flowers and vanishing smoke are compared to the songs of the singer: i.e. the poetry of the world is to be found in the invisible and ephemeral, rather than the visible and permanent. Echoing this, in ‘Near Crete’ the sound of the waves become poet: “whispering tales… of ships that come no more.” Again the image arrives and then disappears. Poetry: always vanishing.

serene as the mountains—
thy love

Fay’s work also has feminist and queer undertones. In ‘Beyond’, for instance, Fay seeks a world “untenanted by men,” i.e. beyond patriarchy: “beyond the veil of future’s mystery.” In ‘All This Is Thy Love To Me’ Fay appears to be addressing another woman, and their “love” is described in terms that would have dominantly been read as “feminine” at that time (fair, calm, mysterious, angelic). Furthermore, as neither poet nor lover have textually definite genders, the subject-positions of the poem are left open to suggestion, able to be occupied by readers of any gender and sexuality.

    
              —: After Alice M. Fay :—
                        by Dick Whyte

       “into air—the scent of a violet sings!”

                                I.

       immortal the flower's stem:
       an umbilical of petals ontologically

       arrested

                                II.

       make no mistake,
       you can't pry open the head of an ocean

       without imagining our annihilation

                                III.

       when the sun goes down
       be kind to one other,

       haven't you spoken sparrow before?

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poets Presents:

Forgotten Poems, a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print poetry from the late-1800s and early-1900s. Explore the archives:


More from the Book of Lost Rhymes . . .


More queer poetry . . .


More poems about flowers . . .


More poems about dawn . . .


More poems about stars . . .


More poems about poetry . . .


]]><![CDATA[Leon Srabian - 5 Very Short Poems (1925)]]>https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/leon-srabian-5-very-short-poems-1925https://forgottenpoets.substack.com/p/leon-srabian-5-very-short-poems-1925Sun, 03 Aug 2025 12:29:43 GMT

   
              —: The Cow :—

       The thoughtful cow
       Looks at the lifted bird,
       Like a philosopher gazing at a star.
       Finally the cow tells her calf
       What a bird is.
    
    
              —: The City :—

       The city is a monster
       Swallowing what comes within its reach.
       The groves on the hilltops
       Are perturbed sentinels
       Warning the fields.
       But the city is a far crawling dinosaur,
       With its factory-claws
       Already at the vitals of the field.
       
    
              —: The Horses :—

       The prancing horses
       Are my wild dreams
       Scooped clean out of me,
       The mane-winged horses—
       Startled by the whistling train—
       Running and snorting
       At the hindering fences.
   
   
              —: Be My Song :—

       Be my shepherd's song,
       And I the rustic lad
       Who knows no song but one.

       On my birthday when they ask me,
       “Leon, you must sing your song,”
       I will sing you so well
       That all shall ask me to sing again.
       Let love become such laziness with me
       That no whip shall drive me
       To learn another song.
       Let your love be a lightning-rod to my heart
       To whose mangers you have tied
       So many speechless beings.
       Be my song.
    
    
              —: The Joy of Mystery :—

       You are space, many-dimensioned.
       I, the poet, am to you
       What the scientist is to the space.
       Failing to solve your mystery,
       I shake my head, but yet with joy.

Leon Srabian Herald (1896-1976) emigrated from Armenia to America in 1912 with his family, and worked in Detroit car factories. Studied at the University of Wisconsin, where he befriended fellow poets Zona Gale and Marianne Moore. In 1925 moved to New York, just after publishing his first book of poems, This Waking Hour, dedicated to the one million Armenian lives lost at the hands of the Ottoman empire in 1915-16. Was a tireless “advocate for the working-class” and a member of the League of American Writers, led by the Communist Party of the USA, alongside Conrad Aiken, W.H. Auden, Maxwell Bodenheim, Countee Cullen, Sarah Bard Field, Albert Einstein, et al.

“A bird sings on the crater of a volcano. 13 years ago Srabian left his village; today not a trace of it remains, and he knows only that where were his people, there is silence. These songs have their own beauty, distinct from any other. It is beauty old yet ever new; it is old truth, new meaning; it is old impulse, new image; it is immemorial sadness, inextinguishable gaiety. Above all, the poet's world is not far but rather it interpenetrates people and the machinery of being, becomes their universe, in which they and their machinery float. And not strangely but as a matter of course. Where else should they float? Where else, in fact, is there to float?” (Zona Gale, This Waking Hour, 1925)

    
              —: After Leon Srabian :—
                        by Dick Whyte

       a grey-green sheet
       becomes a hut

       & a blue duvet
       becomes a pond

       & she tells me
       a frog lives there

       & i believe her

Donations

Subscribe now

Bookshop


Forgotten Poets Presents:

Forgotten Poems, a living anthology of obscure and out-of-print poetry from the late-1800s and early-1900s. Explore the archives:


More Marxist poetry . . .


More poems about birds . . .


More poems about the city . . .


More poems about monsters . . .


More poems about factories . . .


More poems about poetry . . .


]]>